The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing and Advertising Online

Affiliate marketing online is the concept and strategy on converting income or sales by the use of cost effective advertising. Every marketing 101 student knows that the “4 P’s of marketing” (Product, Place, Promotion, and Price) are the most important areas to cover. In order to convert well, you must have powerful advertising campaigns to help market and “brand” your website. In this article you will learn some of the most cost effective and efficient practices that are widely used by professionals all over the web.

Different Approaches to Advertising Online

There are many, techniques involved when advertising your website and business online. One of the many ways is to achieve high page rankings in the search engines by implementing the use of search engine optimization however I’m writing about affiliate marketing and advertising online so my main focus is to discuss this topic clearly. Please note that search engine optimization and search engine marketing are two totally different things however they both share similar characteristics.

Advertising with Leads
Another effective approach is to use the concept known as “LEADS”. A lead is when a publisher advertises your website and they get a percentage or a fixed rate commission whenever they refer someone that helps to generate a sale. This strategy can save a company a lot of money than using high valued CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions). There are over thousands of active bloggers currently online that are willing to advertise your product on his or her blog. Take advantage of this amazing opportunity since many professional bloggers that make their living from blogging will write a nice descriptive article about your site or the product you are selling so they can generate the traffic in order to monetize from your ads. Simply, the webmaster will write a descriptive article about your product and place an advertisement banner near the end of the content (Ad Blending), you can monetize from their search engine traffic at the same time increase your “PR / Page Rank”. This is a win-win situation and you must read more on the publisher’s perspective in order to fully understand the true concept behind lead advertising.

CPM Advertising
CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions) advertising is when you display ads across many different advertising networks like Google Adwords in order to “just get it out there”. This practice is one of the fastest ways to market online however you must get your advertisement units displayed on websites that are in the same niche. Simply, this method of advertising is based on the amount of “ad views”. In order for this strategy to perform well, you need to keep track on your visitor statistics which many of these big advertising companies will have an application that will show the impressions, click ratio, referral tracking, and more.

PPC Advertising
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising is when you set a bid or a budget on how much money you want to spend on a single click or “page landing”. This form of advertising is argued by many webmasters since “fraudulent clicks” a.k.a. “click fraud” is a highly used method by many unethical publishers on the net. Not to mention, a visitor could land on your website and “accidentally” click on one of your ads. PPC advertising can also include “Sponsored Links” or “Sponsored Results” that many search engines like Google and Yahoo will display. Usually these advertisements or PPC units are displayed at the top of the search results or to the right column. These advertisements will display based on the context of your website and the search term. The problem with these ads being displayed at the top of the search results increase the likeliness of visitors that have no intention on making a purchase. Instead, the intentions were to learn more about the “searched term”. This is where lead advertising can excel in targeting the right visitors to your site.

Full Page Advertising
FPA (Full-Page-Advertising) is a concept that was fully introduced by Adbrite. Simply, this system redirects to display a full page website after a certain time has elapsed when browsing a website. I believe this strategy was introduced to help replace the older traditional “Pop-Up” advertising which annoys many website visitors.

Pop-Up Advertising
Simple… Don’t use this method! It’s a waste of space on the internet. Sorry if you think differ! I’ve just had the worse experience with this method. Think about it, people recognize these annoying things so they close the window as fast as they can. How can anyone possibly convert?

Social Networks and Bookmarks
There are hundreds of popular social networks and bookmarking communities online such as MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Furl, Spurl, Reddit etc. It is important to try and market your business on these websites. You’re probably wondering, “These sites charge an arm and a leg for advertising!”. This is not the case if you look at it in a different approach. Most social networks will have a section for classifieds, groups, forums, and much more however you need to follow the Terms of Service / Terms of Use to prevent getting banned. Another approach is to place a “Digg Counter” or a 3rd party bookmarking widget such as “AddThis.com” and “ShareThis.com”. Both of these popular bookmarking widgets offer a free service in allowing people to bookmark your website that will be displayed publicly on their website. These sites also have a free statistics back-end panel so you can view who, where, what, and when someone had bookmarked your website. I will write another article to discuss this concept more clearly.

Advertising on your own Website

This marketing approach can help decide whether or not your business makes or breaks a sale. Displaying regular ad banners of your own product or service within your own website can guide the visitor to more information they would like to see before they make that final decision in whipping out the plastic. Many potential customers can end up leaving your site due to not having enough information about your product or service. Also, it is proven that more graphics, displays, and descriptions will actually lure more customers rather than a simple ugly web page that often tend to scare people away.

Start Blogging!
Want to be in on a little secret … Blogging and writing newly fresh content on your website can help increase your traffic! Writing unique and descriptive content can help increase your search engine traffic. I have created a new category on “Blogging for Income” and will be writing more articles on this topic.

POP Advertising
POP (Point-of-Purchase) advertising and YES, it does exist online! Have you ever been on a website where after a few seconds you have landed, a square advertisement unit will start sliding from the side to the middle of the web page? This is known as a “Fly-In” banner. This form of advertising can be unobtrusive if used properly. Instead of having an advertisement display “$9.99, BUY IT NOW! ” you may want to do something else that will help the visitor rather than annoy the user. An example would be to use something that would link to “More Information” or “Frequently Answered Questions”. For even a stronger approach you could display promotions and coupons!

Getting Dynamic
So, you really want to impress the visitor eh? Displaying more dynamic content such as Flash applications can actually describe more than words. You’ve heard the phrase “A picture can say a thousand words.”, well, a rotating picture can say a million! And yes it is very true when it comes to marketing. I’m one of those types of customers that have to go and physically demo the product myself before I decide to purchase. Guess what, I’m not alone. That is why many websites like Verizon will have a Flash application that demonstrates the functionality of a product based on the user’s input. The greater the dynamics, the more intrigued you will make the potential customer. The more intrigued they are in your product or service, the more likely they will make a purchase.

My Conclusion

Marketing online can be one of the many frustrating challenges when it comes to increasing business revenue. There are many options to choose from and I recommend trying to use all of the strategies I have outlined. The most important concept in successful campaigning is to study your website statistics constantly so checking these stats will be the most useful tool in your marketing project. Trends and a little bit of history can help you to figure out which marketing approach is performing better than others. There’s a lot more information that I could go into detail on the search engine marketing topic. I will be posting more articles that covers each topic in depth.